To be near unto God - pagina 419

holds back the passionately longed-for sleep from our eyes. Sleeplessness is a part of human misery, which is foreign to younger years, but which in later years few escape. As in good prayer the mind excludes itself from the world, but is the more clearly awake to the higher world of thought, so it can also be in the dream and in sleepless slumber. In sleep the mind should sink away in forgetfulness, but on the contrary it lives the more intensely in terrifying or And in place of rest the mind in holy dreams. finds in sleepless slumber only a greater tension and far more pressing and wearing activity. And the Lord is also in this. Asaph expressed it with fervent piety: "Thou holdest mine eyes watching."

This spiritual recognition, that it is not chance, but the Lord who holds our eyes waking, shows that dreamlife and sleepless slumber serve a purpose.

By means

of

them the Lord intends

to do

something; and when at night the heart communes with itself, and the spirit makes diligent search, this, too, is a part of our life for which we are responsible. Sin consists not only of words and deeds, but also in thoughts, also in what goes on in the mind. We are responsible even for our dreams. Not for what happens to us in our dreams, but for what we do in them. We do not all have the same dreams. Every one dreams according to the content of his imagination. And however little we may be lord and master over our dreams, every one feels, that in case our Savior has known a dreamlife, it can not have been otherwise than perfectly holy. In the night itself we can not make the dream dif415

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